Glorifying the Ghetto

Just when you’d thought you’d heard everything, comes Beauty Turner (pictured above), a Chicago woman obsessed with romanticizing the inner city projects that the city of Chicago has begun tearing down.

"I want you to see what I see," says Beauty Turner, after leading the group off the bus to a weedy lot where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. "To hear the voices of the voiceless."

Turner is a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, and has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transformation," which since the late 1990s has demolished 50 of the 53 public housing high-rises — including Cabrini-Green — and replaced them with mixed-income housing.

City officials have heralded the plan. But Turner believes the city, once accused of leaving residents to be victimized by violent drug-dealing gangs, is now pushing those same people from their homes without giving them all a place to go.

"I have people becoming homeless behind this plan, people that's living on top of each other with relatives," said Turner, who has given informal tours for years before the community newspaper she works for began renting the bus in January and charging tourists $20 for the ride. "For some it has improved their conditions, but for the multitude of many it has not."

Chicago Housing Authority officials claim that Turner is glossing over the failures of public housing. They say the 25,000 units being built or rehabbed are enough for the number of people whose buildings were demolished.

"She is running out of bad things to show people," housing authority spokesman Bryan Zises said. "She is taking a circuitous route so she doesn't have to drive by the new stuff," including, he adds, Turner's own home in one of the new mixed-income communities.

On the tours, Turner talks about the strong, black women like herself who raised their children in the projects.

"This is where people lived, played, stayed and died here, just like in your area. ... Children played here," she tells the students, academics, activists and residents of Chicago and surrounding suburbs who take the tour — most of them white and visiting a part of Chicago they've only seen on television or from the expressway.

She downplays the years of violence, saying that all those news reports distorted what day-to-day life was like.

"All the horror stories that you heard about in the newspapers, it was not like that at all," she said.
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But the stories loom over the tour. They are impossible to forget. By the time the city started pulling down or rehabilitating the projects in the late 1990s, each one had its own headlines that spoke to the failure of public housing in Chicago.

According to reports, a young boy, at Cabrini-Green was struck by a bullet and killed as he walked hand-in-hand with his mother.

At the Ida B. Wells project, a 5-year-old boy was dangled and then deliberately dropped to his death from a 14-story window by two other children.

And at Robert Taylor, where the illegal drug trade thrived, a rookie police officer was shot to death on a stakeout outside a gang drug base.

Turner could even add her own story. She saw a teenage boy shot on the very day she arrived at the Robert Taylor Homes in 1986.

Her approach had some on the tour shaking their heads.

"Are they romanticizing these communities?" asked Mark Weinberg, a 44-year-old Chicago lawyer. "These were drug-ridden, violent neighborhoods where people wanted to live a good life but couldn't."

They were also home to many, many dysfunctional people who made it next to impossible for the beleagured decent residents to forge a decent life. The really strange thing here is a woman waxing nostalgic over those concrete tombs that were the Housing Projects built in the 50's & 60's, while opposing a $1.6 Billion rennovation project that not only upgrades the housing stock in the area, but promises a home for all of the people displaced by the demolition of those Housing Projects...and ironically enough, the woman waxing nostaligic about the Housing Projects, HERSELF, lives in one of the newly renovated residences!

Well, at least they're making money on the bus tour. That's Capitalism in action!

Obama: I'll Picket for Votes...

Remember seeing those signs some homeless people held up; "I'll work for food," well, Barack Obama has a new twist on that, as he's telling union activists he would walk a picket line as president if organized labor helps elect him in 2008, in effect, "I'll picket for votes."

SEE: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070721/ap_on_el_pr/obama_labor

More MSM Misinformation...AND Liberal Nepotism!

Jack Kelly at RealClearPolitics.com has scooped two new major incidents of U.S. MSM misinformation, although today, in the wake of the AP using Hammas operative, “Green Helmet” for coverage of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict, the NY Times being found out using insurgents as war photographers, this is hardly news any more.

Kelly notes, “Jennifer Hunter (pictured above) is married to Chicago Sun-Times publisher John Cruickshank, which explains why Ms. Hunter writes a column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is why she should not.

“On July 16, Ms. Hunter wrote a column which began: "After watching the top five Democratic candidates for president speak before a trial lawyers' group Sunday, attorney Jim Ronca of Philadelphia, a staunch Republican, became certain of one thing: He is not going to vote for a Republican in the 2008 presidential election."

“A suspicious reader checked out Mr. Ronca's political contributions. Mr. Ronca had made 14 since 1994 -- 12 to Democrats. The Democratic candidates received $7,000; the GOP candidates $750.”

Whoops! I guess Jenny Hunter goofed...Big Time!

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“Mr. Ronca's contribution record was posted on several Web sites, whose readers flooded Ms. Hunter with demands for a correction.

“If Ms. Hunter had fessed up, I wouldn't be writing about her. But she responded by attacking Web loggers for doing the research she should have done, and blaming her error on her editor.

"The grumbling arose partially because my editor took a small part of my story and made it into a headline: 'GOP lawyer sold on Dems,'" Ms. Hunter wrote in her July 19 column.

"But what her readers objected to was the description of Mr. Ronca as a "staunch Republican," which was Ms. Hunter's own, and which appeared in her lede. To blame the headline writer for the mistake is as dishonest as it is lame.”

Maybe Jenny Hunter should be writing for hate sites like D-Kos or Media Matters and not the Chicago Sun-Times.

Mr. Kelly also uncovered yet another atrocity against the truth at the New Republic. As he notes, “The New Republic was shamed when two high profile writers (Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass) were discovered to have made up stories. The venerable liberal magazine apparently has another scandal on its hands.

“In last week's issue the New Republic ran an article by "Scott Thomas," who -- the editors tell us -- is a pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Iraq.

"Thomas" describes three instances of shocking behavior by U.S. troops. In the first, his buddies humiliate a woman in the chow hall who was disfigured by an IED. In the second, a soldier excavating a mass grave puts a portion of a child's skull on his head and wears it like a helmet for an entire day. In the third, the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle deliberately runs over a dog in the street.

“The New Republic's editors told a skeptical Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard the chow hall incident took place at FOB Falcon near Baghdad, and the mass grave was uncovered in farmland south of the Baghdad airport.

“But soldiers currently serving at FOB Falcon say they've never seen a woman there fitting Scott Thomas' description. (There are only a handful of women, and just one small mess hall on the base.) They also find incredible Thomas' claim he couldn't tell whether the woman was a soldier or a civilian. (Soldiers in Iraq wear their uniforms -- and carry their weapons -- at all times.) "There was no mass grave found during the construction of our Coalition outposts at any time," Major Kirk “Luedeke, the public affairs officer at FOB Falcon, emailed milblogger Matt Sanchez.”

Why do Left-wing “journalists” continue to insist on disgracing themselves like this?

Interestingly enough, Jenny Hunter’s bio says nothing about being the “boss’s wife.”

“Jennifer Hunter is a political columnist for the Sun-Times. Previously she wrote editorials for the paper about foreign affairs public policy and she also penned a weekly column about women’s issues, ranging from the abortion debate to the perils of wearing stiletto heels. Hunter was the editor of North Shore magazine before she joined the Sun-Times in 2004. She spent much of her 31-year professional career in Canada before moving to Chicago six years ago — working as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Globe and Mail and Maclean’s weekly news magazine. In the late 1980s she took time away from reporting to work as an associate professor in the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto, where she stayed for six years until joining Maclean’s as Vancouver bureau chief. She was one of the first women in North America to cover sports: travelling on the road for part of a season with the Montreal Expos in 1981. She has written about business issues, sports, city news and politics and her stories range from the drama of the diamond rush in the Canadian Arctic, to an interview with wrestler Hulk Hogan (while she was four months pregnant), a profile of former Mets catcher Gary Carter, an afternoon at home with writer George Plimpton and the riots at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 2000. She intends to keep on writing until someone tells her to stop. And she will likely ignore them anyway.”

As Jack Kelly says, “The Web makes it harder for journalists to lie and get away with it. This is a lesson Jennifer Hunter and the editors of the New Republic evidently haven't learned.”

SEE: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/two_tales_of_journalistic_dish.html

Britain’s Brown is no Peacenik!

When Tony Blair stepped aside last month, many Liberal extremists both here and in Britain, hoped he’d reverse course on “Blair’s ill-fated and needless expansion of police powers and the targeting of British Muslims, along with a clear break on the military War on Terrorism (WoT)."

That has proved NOT to be the case, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the British Parliament earlier today (Wednesday, 7/25/07) that police need more time to question suspects longer than 28 days in some complex terrorism cases.

Brown said another proposal, to allow police to question suspects after being charged, would minimize the number of exceptions to the 28-day standards.

He also announced a review into the use of wiretaps in court cases, a practice currently banned in Britain. And he proposed creation of a unified border police force combining the work of immigration, customs and visa agencies.

Brown told the House of Commons, "Our country — and all countries — have to confront a generation long challenge to defeat al-Qaida inspired terrorist violence."

One option would include using current state of emergency laws to grant police a maximum of 58 days to question suspects, Brown said.

Worse still for “peacenik prospects” was that on Monday (7/23/07) Brown refused to rule out military action in Iran!

"I firmly believe that the sanctions policy that we are pursuing will work, but I'm not one who's going forward to say that we rule out any particular form of action," Brown told a news conference, when asked if he would rule out a military strike against Iran.

The United Nations Security Council has imposed two rounds of sanctions since December on Iran for failing to halt uranium enrichment, a process which can produce fuel for power plants or material for warheads. A third sanctions resolution is being considered.

Brown said he believed the current sanctions were having an effect, but he thought there would still be a third resolution.

"There will probably be a third resolution in relation to Iran soon ... I appeal to the Iranian authorities to understand the feelings that other countries have about the development of a nuclear weapons program," he said.

French Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Denis Simonneau told an online briefing it was necessary to maintain "a message of firmness" until Iran suspended sensitive activities.

SEE: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070723/ts_nm/britain_iran_dc

and: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070725/ap_on_re_eu/britain_terrorism_5;_ylt=AgfGxZq5hgifHoSGHIP4w_2WwvIE

Good Democrats...

Over 100 House Democrats Help Defeat the Fairness Doctrine, While in the Senate Dick Durbin Blocks Norm Coleman’s Fairness Doctrine Foil


Last month, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 309-115, amended the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill to bar the FCC from requiring broadcasters to balance conservative content.

That vote count means more than half the Democrats in the House voted for the ban as well. That should pretty much bring all discussion about reimposing the doctrine again to a halt.

But, while House Democrats labeled the reintroduction of the FCC's fairness doctrine a non-issue and grandstanding by talk radio, on Friday (July 20, 2007) Senate Democrats blocked an amendment to an appropriations bill similar to one that passed without incident in the House.

Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) tried Friday to amend a defense appropriations bill to insure that the FCC could not reinstate the doctrine, which was scrapped by the FCC as unconstitutional back in 1987. The “Fairness Doctrine” required broadcasters to provide the other side on issues of public importance. It's disappearance from the FCC rulebook helped spur the rise of primarily conservative talk radio.

But Coleman's attempt was blocked in a procedural move by Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Senate Democrats have been most vocal about bringing back the doctrine. "In this day and age, reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine is not about equal balance, as its supporters claim, it is about muzzling broadcasters," said Coleman on his Web site http://coleman.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=1361.

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Coleman has said, "I believe it is a dangerous proposition for the government to be in the business of rationing free speech and determining what is fair."

And Bad...

Democrats Cut “John Doe” Provision Which Would Protect Citizens Who Report Suspicious Behaviors From Civil Litigation.


Ever since 9/11, the government and law enforcement has openly urged citizens to be vigilent and to report suspicious behavior. Nevertheless, congressional Democrats Thursday stripped a provision in the pending 9/11 Commission recommendations legislation that would protect citizens from being sued for reporting suspicious behavior to authorities that may lead to a terrorist attack.
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Rep. Peter T. King, a New York Republican who previously chaired the House Homeland Security Committee, said "This is a slap in the face of good citizens who do their patriotic duty and come forward, and it caves in to radical Islamists.”

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A group of six Imams who say they were wrongly removed from US Airways Flight 300 from Minneapolis to Phoenix on Nov. 20 because of passengers and security personnel who separately reported what they believed was suspicious behavior on the part of the Imams, have sued the airline, the Minnesota Metropolitan Airports Commission, and the "John Doe" passengers who reported the men.

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Oddly enough, on March 27, the House approved the "John Doe" amendment on a 304-121 vote.

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"Democrats are trying to find any technical excuse to keep immunity out of the language of the bill to protect citizens, who in good faith, report suspicious activity to police or law enforcement," Mr. King said. "I don't see how you can have a homeland security bill without protecting people who come forward to report suspicious activity."

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While the conference is not likely to meet again, Mr. King noted the conference report has not been written and says he will continue discussions with Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent and chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, to insert the "John Doe" language.

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Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican and ranking member of the committee, announced afterward she will attempt to attach a similar bill to an education measure currently under debate on the Senate floor.

Way Too Much Time on Their Hands???

I don’t know, every once in awhile even I just have to ask the question, “What in the hell is wrong with white people?”

One of those times is now, with the PETA protests over Michael Vick’s “dog fighting” charges.

OK, dog fighting is a horrific activity, especially to dog-lovers everywhere and America IS indeed a dog-loving nation. But it’s also a cultural phenomenon, much like cock-fighting and bull-fighting, which both have far more supporters and fewer detractors.

So I guess, “dog-fighting” suffers from, among other things, unpopularity or “bad PR.”

Still, given that, the PETA protestors around the Vick charges want a man punished (suspended from the NFL without pay), as he’s already taken a paid leave to deal with the upcoming trial, even though he hasn’t been CONVICTED of any crime.

Kudos to blacks, Hispanics and Asians, as I saw none of those represented among the many inane protests over these Vick ALLEGATIONS.

Oh yeah, and to all the dipshit whites who attended and supported those protests – THANKS for making me ashamed of sharing a lack of melanin with you dopes. I mean it’s bad enough we can’t dance...isn’t it?